DNA breakthrough leads to arrest in 1993 Illinois cold case murder

Randy Gail Sperino was found dead in a field beside rural Hanfelder Road near Granite City, Illinois, her nude body bludgeoned and left in the dark on the night of Nov. 9, 1993. She was 33. Investigators identified her the next day, but the killing would sit for more than three decades as one of Madison County’s bleakest cold cases.

That changed on May 26, 2026, when Madison County Sheriff Jeff Connor and State’s Attorney Thomas Haine announced that 70-year-old Albert Lee “Buddy” Zigler had been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in Sperino’s death. Authorities said the arrest came only after new DNA work and genetic genealogy finally tied Zigler to the crime, turning a case that had outlasted an entire generation into one with a named suspect.

Connor said the sheriff’s office had spent years returning to the evidence, rechecking old leads and interviewing hundreds of people as the investigation kept going long after many cases would have gone cold for good. The breakthrough came from forensic methods that did not exist when Sperino was killed, allowing investigators to compare preserved genetic material against newer databases and build the link that had eluded detectives since 1993. That work, officials said, is what put Zigler at the center of the case.

For Sperino’s family, the arrest brought the kind of answer that cold-case anniversaries so often deny. Her son, Wes Sperino, spoke publicly after the charges were announced and said the family had waited nearly 33 years for this moment. The words landing hardest in Edwardsville were the simplest ones Connor used at the announcement: “We got him.”

The killing of Randy Gail Sperino began as a body found in a field off a rural road outside Granite City, a horror scene that held its silence for 33 years. With Zigler now charged, that field no longer marks only the place where she was left behind. It marks the moment a long-unsolved murder finally met a suspect with a name.